Ballots to remain uncounted in MI and Stein blocked in Philly. Guest: Election integrity, law expert Paul Lehto says this proves 'only option is to get it right on Election Night'. Also: Trump taps climate denier, fossil-fuel tool for EPA...

George Stephanopoulos interviewed Senator Arlen Specter on today's edition of ABC's This Week.

On the issue of warrent-less NSA Wiretaps authorized by the president, Stephanopoulus asked Specter what the possible remedies would be if the president's actions were found to be illegal. Specter replied, "...Impeachment is the remedy. After impeachment, you could have a criminal prosecution..."

In a major address slated for delivery Monday in Washington, the former Vice President is expected to argue that the Bush administration has created a "Constitutional crisis" by acting without the authorization of the Congress and the courts to spy on Americans and otherwise abuse basic liberties.

Aides who are familiar with the preparations for the address say that Gore will frame his remarks in Constitutional language.
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Indeed, his aides and allies are framing it as a "call to arms" in defense of the Bill of Rights and the rule of law in a time of executive excess.

The vice president will, according to the groups that have arranged for his appearance --- the bipartisan Liberty Coalition and the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy --- address "the threat posed by policies of the Bush Administration to the Constitution and the checks and balances it created.
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Former U.S. Representative Bob Barr, the Georgia Republican who served as one of the most conservative members of the House, plans to introduce Gore. Barr, an outspoken critic of the abuses of civil liberties contained in the USA Patriot Act critic who has devoted his post-Congressional years to defending the Bill of Rights, refers to the president's secret authorization of domestic wiretapping as "an egregious violation of the electronic surveillance laws."

With Barr on board, and the event being co-sponsored by the Liberty Coalition, it's gonna be a helluva lot harder for the wingnuts to try and discredit Gore here. Though, no doubt, they're busy this weekend plotting exactly how they hope to do so.

Dick Marty, a Swiss Senator, is leading the Council of Europe's inquiry into reports that the C.I.A. operated secret prisons in several European countries. Marty is also looking into other C.I.A. activities including the use of European airports and airbases for U.S. rendition flights along with kidnappings and torture on European soil.

Investigators are scheduled to complete a preliminary report on January 23rd. Dick Marty gave a press conference where he shared some of his early conclusions.

Marty accuses the U.S. of violating civil rights. He also says that European leaders have known about the U.S. crimes. Several European leaders are complicit because of their "shocking" passivity. Marty has no doubt that the secret prisons exist and that the U.S. activities in Europe are illegal.

BBC has documented more of Dick Marty's allegations in this article and the following video report.

A U.S. air strike in Pakistan targeted the al-Qaeda leader, Ayman al-Zawahri. The attack destroyed 3 houses in small village near the Pakistan border. 18 people, including women and children were also killed.

Pakistan officials and other sources are reporting that al-Zawahri was not killed in the attack as previously thought.

Pakistan condemned the air strike because of the loss of civilian lives. Today, hundreds of people in Pakistan protested the U.S. action.

Are the voting machine vendors now teaming up against an election official who dared reveal the vulnerabilities of their voting machines?

As you'll recall, Ion Sancho, Leon County, Florida's courageous Supervisor of Elections stood up against both the state and Diebold and said that he would never again use Diebold's voting equipment after he allowed for a test which demonstrated their election equipment was easily hackable. The results revealed an electronic optical-scan election on Diebold equipment could be flipped without a trace being left behind.

After dumping Diebold, Sancho made a deal to buy machines instead from Election Systems & Software, Inc. (ES&S) on the promise that they would supply their optical scan machines for use along with the AutoMARK system which prints a countable paper ballot. AutoMARK has an agreement to allow ES&S exclusive marketing rights for their machines.

But a strange thing happened after Sancho's agreement with ES&S and just prior to the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) deadline on January 1, 2006. As reported by Susan Pynchon of Florida Fair Elections Coalition, a voice-mail message was left on Sancho's cell-phone on December 29, 2005 by Gary Crump, ES&S Chief Operating Officer. Crump was calling to inform Sancho that the company had decided to deal only with long-time customers due to equipment deadline considerations. Pynchon says that statement is "patently untrue, since ES&S went ahead and contracted with Volusia County, Florida after agreeing to sell to Leon County."

Pynchon goes on to offer some possible reasons for this odd betrayal and what the Leon County Manager had to say about it:

Since the reason given by ES&S for refusing to do business with Sancho is not valid, what could the real reason be? Is it retribution for exposing the vulnerabilities of the Diebold optical scan system. Is it collusion on the part of Diebold and ES&S? Or is ES&S simply afraid that Sancho might authorize similar "tests" on its equipment, exposing vulnerabilities in the ES&S voting system?

When Sancho explained to the Leon County Manager about the events that had transpired, the county manager responded that he is 100% supportive of Sancho's efforts to fight for paper-based verified voting systems, and urged Sancho not to succumb to intimidation by voting system vendors.

In Arizona there has been a quiet (media nearly silent) battle about the Precinct 20 vote in last November's election. There may have been election fraud, machine mistakes, procedure mistakes, or no problems at all. Doug Jones, UofIowa, was asked by a state senator and a local newspaper to look at everything that he could look at and then report back. His report is an amazing read. In New Mexico Governor Richardson and the SoS are now fully in favor of a vvpat. It's amazing what a lawsuit can do to frame your thinking. And in Florida, ES&S has turned on Leon County and refuses to sell their equipment to the county. Those of you who have responded to the Action Alert from VoteTrustUSA have sent 15,372 emails to the EAC along with 1890 letters demanding the ITA be made to do their job....

The National Security Agency advised President Bush in early 2001 that it had been eavesdropping on Americans during the course of its work monitoring suspected terrorists and foreigners believed to have ties to terrorist groups, according to a declassified document.

The NSA's vast data-mining activities began shortly after Bush was sworn in as president and the document contradicts his assertion that the 9/11 attacks prompted him to take the unprecedented step of signing a secret executive order authorizing the NSA to monitor a select number of American citizens thought to have ties to terrorist groups.

It looks like the Rightwing may have found a replacement for the American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR), the GOP front group set up to smokescreen against true election reform and transparent democracy. The ACVR has been mighty quiet of late, which we might like to attribute to their having been thoroughly discredited and rendered mostly impotent due to some longterm, airtight, crack reporting here by The BRAD BLOG about their attempted democracy-hating scam.

But now, a West Coast "non-partisan" conservative think-tank called Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy (PRI) may be stepping in to fill at least part of the void in the person of TechNews World columnist and PRI Director of Technology Studies, Sonia Arrison. Arrison has been op/ed'ing and releasing "white papers" lately rallying against voter-verified paper ballots for electronic voting machines. Her reasons for being against transparent democracy are both bizarre and seem freshly pulled out of her hind quarters (or out of those of Diebold's).

We'll look at some of her already-discredited charges in a moment, but let's take a look at this PRI group. Their staff seems to be a who's-who of Canadians, staffers of former-California Governor Pete Wilson, former staffers of Tom DeLay ally Rep. Richard Pombo (R-CA), and other "conservative" "thinkers".

PRI seems to be little more than yet another dirty dot in the massive now-metastasized matrix of "conservative" think-tanks, phony trade-associations, lobbying firms, consultants, columnists, politicians, "reporters" and other media pimps who are part of a wickedly tentacled network of people and organizations meant to prop up wingnut causes in the press while firing up the unquestioning, lockstep "grass-roots" believers...

As we reported yesterday, indicted former House Majority Leader, Tom DeLay (R-TX) had threatened television stations with litigation if they dared to air a 30-second spot exposing his corruption and calling for him to resign.

According to House Chronicle today, it looks like at least four Houston stations (DeLay's home district), have rolled over for the once-powerful (and apparently still powerful) Republican pol:

The four Houston television stations that sold airtime for a commercial criticizing U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay refused to air it Wednesday after objections from a DeLay lawyer, but the ad was accessible on cable channels and the Internet.

The stations offered little or no rationale for their decisions, nor would they comment on whether the letter from DeLay campaign lawyer Don McGahn influenced them.

Today has been a very busy day as you can see from the length of this list. It was announced that the lawsuit in New Mexico is being joined by 6 more plaintiffs and then the Governor announced that he wants to do away with all of the paperless DREs and move to optical-scan only. Boulder Co., Colorado decided to scrap their plans to purchase new voting machines because there is nothing out there that can be trusted to do as advertised. The Montgomery Co., PA lawsuit has been sent to state court. The DoJ has announced that they may be filing a suit against the state of New York for not complying with HAVA. And the Georgia House passed, in a heated floor debate, another voter ID bill. Those of you who have responded to the Action Alert from VoteTrustUSA have sent 15,242 emails to the EAC along with 1875 letters demanding the ITA be made to do their job....

On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Justice threatened in a letter to sue New York state over its failure to modernize its voting system in compliance with the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002. The BRAD BLOG has obtained a copy of the complete letter sent from Asst. Attorney General Wan J. Kim, of the DoJ's Civil Rights Division, to NY's Attorney General Elliot Spitzer and General Counsel Todd Valentine.

In the letter, Kim informs the state that he has received authorization to file "a lawsuit on behalf of the United States against the State of New York as well as the New York State Board of Elections, et al."

That, despite the Federal Government's own egregious failures to fully comply with HAVA requirments. The lawsuit against the "blue state" would be the first attempted action taken against any state by DoJ for failing to meet the requirements of HAVA since one of its major deadlines passed on January 1 of this year.

The complete letter from the DoJ is posted at the bottom of this article.

As reported by the New York Times today the DoJ has accused New York of being further behind than every other state in complying with new guidelines laid out by HAVA:

The state has yet to decide what kind of new voting machines it will certify, leaving many local elections boards in uncertainty as they try to modernize their voting systems in time for next fall's primary elections. The state missed the Jan. 1 deadline for creating a statewide database of registered voters, as required by the federal Help America Vote Act.

New York is behind all other states and territories in deciding how to spend its share of $2.3 billion in federal aid to modernize voting machines and other elections technology. So far the state has received $220 million to replace its 20,000 aging voting machines, train local election officials to use the new machines, and create the voter database. The money is unspent and collecting interest, officials say.

A Justice Department letter told state officials this week that it had authorized a lawsuit against New York for failing to comply with the law. The letter said that the department hoped to settle the matter by negotiating a court order with the state instead going to court, but that "we are prepared to file a complaint if the matter is not resolved expeditiously."

Wan J. Kim, the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's civil rights division, wrote in the letter that "it is clear that New York is not close to approaching full H.A.V.A. compliance and, in our view, is further behind in that regard than any other state in the country." A copy of the letter was given to The New York Times by someone who believes the state has been too slow to overhaul its system.

The question now, for Election Reform advocates, is whether Elliott Spitzer, the aggressive New York State Attorney General, will stand up to this threat and point out to the DoJ the extraordinarily lax execution of HAVA by the federal government themselves! Given the Feds' own lack of compliance of the disastrous "Election Reform" bill hastily created in the wake of the 2000 Florida Election Debacle, the ironies here are many. The legislation itself, as revealed in a recent BRAD BLOG exposé, was apparently financed by voting machine vendors such as Diebold, and other shady characters named in the Jack Abramoff scandal.

In response to George W. Bush's statement yesterday that hearings on the NSA program are "good for democracy," Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), on behalf of the minority members of the U.S. House Judiciary committee, has today sent invitations to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo to testify at planned hearings next Friday on the matter of warrentless NSA spying on United States citizens.

In the letter to Gonzales, obtained by The BRAD BLOG, Conyers quotes from Bush's comments yesterday at a Town Hall Forum in Kentucky in apparent support of such hearings (full letters to both Gonzales and Yoo posted at bottom of this article):

I would note that, just this past Wednesday, the President stated his support for this type of congressional review of the National Security Agency program. He stated, “There will be a lot of hearings and talk about that, but that's good for democracy – just so long as the hearings, as they explore whether or not I have the prerogative to make the decision I made doesn't tell the enemy what we're doing.” The purpose of our inquiry is precisely that, to explore whether the President possesses the constitutional or statutory power to authorize the surveillance he did.

Yoo, now a law professor at the University of California, Berkley has been an ardent defender of the Bush Administration's unrestrained exercise of Executive power in secretly monitoring United States citizens via warrantless NSA wiretaps. He is also reportedly the architect, along with Gonzales, of several controversial Administration positions concerning their right to torture and the notion that prisoners of war in Afghanistan and elsewhere did not fall under the protections of the Geneva Convention.

The congressional hearings are scheduled for next Friday by Democratic members of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee.

In a statement to The BRAD BLOG, Conyers discussed his strong belief in Congressional oversight of the Executive branch despite unwillingness of members of Bush's own party to do so.

"It is imperative that we do everything we can to investigate abuses by the Bush Administration, whether the Majority is willing to or not," he told us. "Last time we held hearings on the Downing Street Documents, we were forced to the basement, but that didn't stop our message and the message for more than 500,000 Americans from getting out."

Conyers and other Democrats held hearings last June on the so-called "Downing Street Documents", which revealed the Bush Administration had planned to use military power in Iraq long before they had admitted as much to either Congress or the American people.

Those hearings, carried live on CSPAN, were followed by Conyers' hand-delivery of more than 500,000 signatures from Americans, demanding answers about those top-secret British memos from the White House.

The Democrats have once again requested a Capital Building Hearing room from the Republicans, who control scheduling of such rooms. They have yet to hear back as to wether they will be granted one or not for next Friday's hearings.

Scheduled to testify at the hearings so far are: Bruce Fein, Associate Deputy Attorney General under Reagan, Jonathon Turley, Professor of law, George Washington Univ. Law School, Jeffrey H. Smith, former CIA General Counsel and Caroline Frederickson of the ACLU.

Smith, it was revealed by an ABC News report hours ago, has sent a 14-page memo to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence countering the notion that Bush had legal authority to order warrantless wiretaps on U.S. citizens. Smith avers that "it is not credible that the 2001 authorization to use force provides authority for the president to ignore the requirements of FISA."

Surprise! I was able to find someone to help me out and to put together articles for DVN so we will continue chugging along for the time being. There is rumor from good sources that the DoJ has decided to take action against the state of New York for non-compliance to the Help America Vote Act. Those of you who have responded to the Action Alert from VoteTrustUSA have sent 14,747 emails to the EAC along with 1840 letters demanding the ITA be made to do their job....